I'm a transgender girl happily on a journey to looking better, being more feminized and overcoming adversity. Whether in your teens or way beyond, if you’re a transgender girl, this is for you. Like an embassy in a hostile land, this is the place to gain strength, to get empowering information and to belong. I made this place based on what I've learned; I hope it helps you. Welcome home.

Category Archives: Losing Weight

Today, I visited Plato’s Closet in Reno to get some new jeans. My day-to-day jeans are too large and their knees are scuffed through, and they have stains that don’t wash out any more. [Note to self: I need to stop kneeling in oil as I work on my cars.]

Being transgender, I’m basically a mix of male and female parts, and for the first part of my life, I tried to live as a male. It was an epic fail, and depressing to boot. Eventually I could no longer muster the enthusiasm to do proper care and maintenance on the male-looking person staring at me in the mirror. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with being male … but when you’re basically a girl and you feel like you have to live like a male, that IS a problem. I kept putting on weight, and the nice people in my life would gently point out what I knew already and what the scale was telling me. At some point, I was 30 pounds overweight, the magic “now you’ve crossed the line” mark. That wasn’t all. My blood pressure was bad, too, as was the mix of fats in my blood. I was basically going downhill fast and yet I couldn’t motivate myself to care enough to do anything about it.

I’d never enjoyed being in photographs, but as my health and looks kept deteriorating, I was even less enthused. The waist sizes of the jeans I’d buy kept going up. It was a sad situation.

After I realized I was basically a male-female mix but fundamentally female, not male, I started living as a female. Suddenly, I felt basically OK with my body. I started caring for it. I made a database to track what I ate, and the calorie implications of that. I slowly but surely lost weight. Over a two-year time span, I gradually changed shape, and now I look like the picture below, that I took last night:

I think I look good enough now to be happy about my shape. The market seems to agree. Some gentlemen really like the transgender-girl look, and they have paid me to do private modeling and stripper work. In my work as a software developer, I bill my time at $160+ but ironically I have made more money per hour showing off my looks. So, that’s been a validating experience for me.

I recall going into the Charlotte Russe store in Reno, two years ago, and buying size 10 jeans that I thought would fit, since by then I’d already lost some weight. To my embarrassment, they didn’t. I couldn’t even fit into them. I brought them back to the store and asked if I could exchange them for size twelve jeans. Those did fit.

Imagine my delight today, two years later, when I found a pair of size eight jeans that look like the picture that I took today, wearing them. The brand is “Feel Beautiful.”

No, the fire extinguisher isn’t a hint. 🙂

Then, I found some jeans of the exact same brand as the baggy size 12 jeans that I was wearing right then, in the Plato’s Closet store, today — but size 8. I tried them on. They fitted nicely, yay!

On a hunch, I tried on some size 6 jeans of that same brand. Even though they were tight, I thought they fitted well. But, folks who are concerned about their weight are not always realistic. So, I decided to ask the saleslady her opinion. I showed them off, and her verdict was that they fitted fine. Yay!

So, it’s official. I’ve gone from a size 12 to a size 6, in the same brand of jeans, meaning when I compare apples to apples. Better!